This email from Office Depot is significantly narrower than a similar email from competitor Staples. It includes a headline at the very top followed by both "View on Mobile Device" and "View as a Website." The sale call to action is on the left.
4. If you don't have customer reviews on your site, implement them now. Reviews are altering how consumers make purchase decisions and you'll also enjoy more traffic from search engines. Reviews will increase conversions. For example, Dell has found that if a shopper spent time reading reviews on its site, they're twice as likely to make a purchase. Of course, you can also feature top-rated products in your emails. Implementing reviews on your site doesn't have to break the bank. PowerReviews has a relatively inexpensive offering.
5. Examine your segmentation strategy. You don't want to do this when you're in the midst of the holidays. Pay particular attention to past buyers.
6. Give your site the grandma and grandpa test. Get some noncomputer savvy people (e.g., grandma and grandpa) to go through an exercise: Give them a task such as searching for and purchasing a particular item on your site. Then sit back and watch — don't help them. Can they easily accomplish the task? It's also helpful to ask your testers to talk through what they're thinking during the process. A usability expert recently explained that doing this exercise with as little as five people will uncover most of the problems.
7. If you don't have an abandoned cart program, get one! Different sources peg average cart abandonment rates between 71 percent and 75 percent. If your site statistics are similar to the industry average and you don't have an abandoned cart email program, you're losing a lot of money. An abandoned cart email program can help you recapture between 5 percent and 15 percent of otherwise lost sales.